Why are there any incompletely translated episodes in a series?

TV & Movies K-Dramas
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How is this possible? I thought that episodes did not go up on the website until they were completely translated?

I guess this is why you are so confused at the moment. In Viki the videos are published on the site before the teams can start to work with them. Just after the videos are public the team can first segment them and after that’s done start to work with translating episodes. The work is still on process so don’t worry! I know that the CM, english moderators and chief editor for this channel are really responsible and I am sure they will finnish this sooner or later :blush:

I quickly checked on this and there is many reasons why the show isn’t fully translated yet. First one is that it has a late licence. This means that Viki got the show after it already aired so it can be that all the videos were downloaded at once so the team got immediatly a lot to work with. Another reason is that they have very few english subbers and editors so naturally the work can’t be done that quickly and if I am correct this is a viki pass plus channel so only the volunteers who live in States can work on it. So even if the volunteers in Europe would like to step forward and help with the subs they can’t.

So don’t worry, you have to just wait that the team is able to finnish the project :wink:

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In any other case I would have replied the same as you did. But this is different.
Why did they start the next ones, and got that far, before finishing the previous ones?
I’ve been in a lot of teams, and we always do them in order. Yes, if it’s on air, and there are two episodes per week, it can happen that someone is finishing the first one when someone else is starting the next because if one subber is into an episode part nobody else will enter it. But not the situation the Original Poster describes, episode 9 being at 68% while they are working already on episodes 26 and 28. That is indeed weird.

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Well in that case it really sounds a bit weird. As said I live in Europe so I don’t actually see the episodes at all.

But could it be that they have some subbers in their team that are not so experienced with korean? In this case it would make sense that those that know less go on with episodes and translate what they can and the once that are more experienced with the language do the rest. It may take some time with so few people working on it. Of course I don’t know the situation just guessing. This is what I have seen a lot in Chinese dramas that normally have fewer subbers and a lot of episodes are realised in a short time :thinking:

It just would sound weird for me that the CM, english mods and chief editor that this channel has would abandon a show half a way. It can also be that they are paying more attention to the on-air dramas and dramas that have more viewers so it may take a bit more time with this one. Again just speculating.

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I think you’d get your answer and clarification if you’d send the channel’s CM a PM, rather than continuing to speculate, wonder and getting more frustrated about why it is so or what is happening with the team. I’m sure the CM (a good, responsible one, I must add) would have the answer and explanation for you. I believe the team will complete the subtitling eventually.

:slight_smile:

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6

I’ve recently delved more into Chinese projects and the Chinese-English team(s) seem to be exceptionally fast and thorough. Maybe because, alas, there are so few Chinese dramas on Viki.

That is not the norm, though.

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Here’s a post on how subtitling process work in Viki. It looks like Viki may have locked the post and it’s not letting me update it to add “translation editors” role in subtitling. But it should answer most of your questions anyway.

https://discussions.viki.com/t/subtitle-status-question-and-answer/226

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Yes, but did you read that strange thing she says? I cannot check it as I don’t have access to that show.

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It’s actually not strange at all. That question was already addressed in my original Subtitle Status post.
Just keep in mind that MOST of the Ko-En subbers are not 100% fluent. It’s typical that a team of subbers are only capable of doing 60%-70% of translation and then move on.

If there are other 80-100% fluent subbers in the team, then they can work on completing it, but if there aren’t any, then you will see what you are seeing now.

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Oh, so there aren’t enough subbers to begin with, or they all understand the same things, none of them understands the hardest sentences. That makes sense :slight_smile:

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12

This does not explain why, in the case of The Guardians, there are some episodes that are less than 20% complete. Unless at some point, really competent subbers just said, “Oops, gotta go, sorry” and left less competent people hanging.

And from just my perspective as an English speaker, there are some pretty complex English subtitles in the episodes I’ve seen so far. I had to pause the video and re-read to make sure I got what was being said. They were in good, even sophisticated English.

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@imar
Yes, but did you read that strange thing she says? I cannot check it as I don’t have access to that show.

The one that can’t see the drama is someone else and she based her opinion in on what misswillowinlove wrote about the subtitles missing.

stima2d
Well in that case it really sounds a bit weird. As said I live in Europe so I don’t actually see the episodes at all.
misswillowinlove
Episode 9 is 68% translated. Episode 26 is 38% translated. Episode 28 is 6% translated. In fact, from episode 9 on, there is no episode that is 100% translated

@entwyfhasbeenfound
This has been going on for a while here at viki. As a matter of fact, I’m working in a video that is 60, 70 or less percent done, and they continue working on the other episodes. Explanation? Lack of Chinese translators, so the segments in blank are the one’s that need Chinese translations.Does it make sense? No, in my opinion. Everything stays half way done and in some cases is useless to watch the video bc the information needed is incomplete.

What I do now to protect myself from disappointment? I check all episodes to make sure they are at least 80% with english subs bc you’re not missing much since some of this dramas have unnecessary dialogue (that by the way drives me crazy so I skip, skip).

I think is best rather than speak to CM or moderators write to the help center and they can get to the bottom of the real situation there and might be able to resolve it sooner.
One last advice? Before you start watching any videos check the percentage box, it will save you from disappointment. I learned my lesson the hard way too.

Good Luck

14

I also cannot.

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15

Just by reading the synopsis you can tell something is wrong in the drama. I would have not bothered bc reading the synopsis alone, says a lot. I hope they can find someone to do the subs it looks like is a good drama from the little bit I saw.

https://www.viki.com/videos/1120469v

The Guardians Episode 9

Soo-ji is chasing after Lee Jang-su, a taxi driver who was released for a crime 15 years ago. After receiving the mission from their boss, the guardians are purusing.

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Hi!
To be honest, I have no idea where should I write it but since this topic is similar to my problem, I’ll ask you guys here.
So there is a Hungarian translator and

  1. her grammar is horrible, sometimes it’s like she’s using Google Translate
  2. she started translating like 20 K-dramas but I don’t think she finished even one of them
  3. when she starts translating she stops it and translates a new one
    K-dramas ‘translated’ by her:
  • Girls’ Generation 1979, ep 1 27% Hungarian subtitle
  • Distorted ep 1 46%
  • Love Actually ep 4 8%
  • Manhole ep 2 56%
  • Good Thief, Bad Thief ep 10 18%
  • The Nanny Man ep 7 54%
  • Fantastic ep 2 41%
  • Second to last love ep ep 6 34%
  • Dear Fair Lady Kong Shim ep 15 44%
  • Coffee Prince ep 14 52%
  • Definitely Neighbours ep 13 12%
  • Hayate the Combat Butler ep 1 20%
  • School 2013 ep 10 70%
  • Producer ep 1 32%
    She also translated Descendants of the Sun but I was the one to finish the whole K-drama with its 19 episodes…
    She started translating all of these up there, but she doesn’t care about them and starts new 2 projects every week/2 weeks.
    I don’t really know what to do with her, she doesn’t reply my messages, I reported her already but I don’t think Viki checked my report.
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Hi, there. First, would you mind removing the translator’s name from your post? (You can edit your post using the button in the bottom.) Somehow I feel this is not right. Like talking behind a person’s back :wink:

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So, is she the moderator on all of these dramas? And when you say…

Do you mean that she had translated first 9 episodes of this drama and then stopped on the 10th episode? Or has she only translated 18% of that one episode, number 10?

No CM wants to hire a serial quitter. But quitting to translate a drama is also a natural process and happens to all of us on an occasion. What you could do is PM the CMs of these projects and ask she be removed as moderator on them. I know for a fact that when a potential moderator sees another person on a moderator position, they don’t apply for the position. Checking how recently that moderator contributed to the project is very difficult, so you have no idea if this project is still active for that moderator, and so you move on, don’t want to touch it.

That’s why I’m saying that contacting the CMs about this and re-opening the position of Hungarian moderator might be beneficial to these projects. It’s more likely someone else will finish them.

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Oh okay, sorry, I removed her name.
And yeah, she translated the first 9 episodes and stopped the 10th.
I might contach the CM then. Thanks^^

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20

Aha, so it’s not only Greeks who do that. I mentioned some time ago a Greek moderator who has more than 30 dramas, many of which long (30+episodes), and most of which not even touched. She then took an on-air one and managed to finish it, after about… six months or so.
This thing has to be stopped!
But then if one writes to the CMs one fears to be judged as backstabbing or wanting to take her place. CMs should check their projects every now and then.
Truthfully I wouldn’t want most of these dramas, but it must be realized that this kind of greedy hoarding moderators stop others from doing the work.

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21

Re: The Guardians
I am the Chief Editor for English subtitles. Many of you guessed absolutely right. We got a late license so all episodes were uploaded at one time - the same time as two other late license so suddenly I had 48 hours of episodes to find subbers for. Fortunately one series was popular with the subbers and we finished it fairly quickly But Distorted and The Guardians just did not interest a lot of subbers so I was thankful for anyone who volunteered. There is no mistake about the completion % ages.
I have NEVER told the subbers not to work on a later episodes until the prior episode is 100% – this is true whether the drama is a current license or a late license. I am so grateful for the work of our volunteer subbers that they are free to work on an episode to the extent of their ability and then to move on to another episode. People who believe that if we have a lot of subbers, everything will be subbed completely are sadly mistaken. As ajumma2 pointed out subbers differ a lot in ability. I am happy with someone who can sub 50% of what they hear but we need subbers on every episode who can sub 100%-- and there aren’t a lot of them.
So should I insist on 100% on Episode 1 before we move to Episode 2? No way. If the subbers are capable of only 60% on Episode 1, why not work on episode 2? In The Guardians several characters are speaking in a dialect which is hard to understand. As soon as I noted a few blanks I made a prediction about who would be speaking when I encountered the next blank, and I was right. So a lot of the blanks are because of the use of dialect.
I am optimistic always that eventually we will finish – it just won’t be as rapid as we would like.

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22

Thank you for this explanation.

In English, there are a lot of regional dialects that deviate from the standard in terms of vocabulary, and there are a lot of regional dialects that deviate from the standard in terms of pronunciation (although sometimes it’s just a matter of the slurring that occurs when speaking rapidly).

So if I had to translate some English conversations in a hurry under pressure into Spanish (the only other language I know), well, yeah, I would have to leave some blanks.

I will say that The Guardians has so far been a really powerful show for me because of the subtitles. The subtitles really mesh with the body language and tone of voice of the characters.

The show has made amazing use of the K-drama tradition that is part of “the little guy gets revenge for all those who have suffered injustice.”

Every character’s back story is told pretty powerfully and in detail. That has made the pace pretty slow for a “get revenge” story, but because of the characters, I am just foaming at the mouth to get to the episode where the plot takes off and the chaos and deception and payback start exploding like fireworks.

I can understand why some people, including subbers, might not find The Guardians of interest. The lead actor is a woman, not a cute flower boy, and she is not wearing sexy clothes and five inch heels and carrying a name-brand purse. The male actors she interacts with are not cute flower boys, either. And the whole atmosphere at the start is not cute; it is so dark and so sad and so hopeless. In other words, not an escapist rom-com.

But the “good guys” have so much heart, so much passion for seeing justice done that I am already cheering for them, and they haven’t even, in the episodes that are fully subbed, started kicking butt.

So I will wait patiently for the subbing process to move forward. I think it will be worth it.

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